Adventures in Museum-Going

North Carolina Museum of Art:

It's a privilege and an important part of my life to have a very good art museum close to where I live. I'm not as faithful of an adherent as I could be, but in the 20 years I've lived in the area, I've been (conservatively) 30 times. So it is the single collection of art I have seen the most, and by a lot--the next closest would probably be the National Gallery in DC, and I've only been there half a dozen times.

The way I experience most art museums--the way most people experience most arts museums--is "oh shoot in Paris gotta see the Louvre don't know if I'll be back gotta see it all". A mission doomed to failure that inevitably fails in one way or another. Your attention wanders, you look for something in particular and can't find it and miss everything else along the way, jet lag or fatigue from being out and about all day do you in. But the NC Museum of Art--I can drop in, look at the exhibits, and cut off or curtail or rearrange secure it the knowledge that I will get around to the rest of it next time.

There was a significant change to how the museum was organized in the last ten years, and I have found it to be agreeable on the whole. The Museum was built originally around a lot of displaced German artists--LA got the novelists, NYC the intellectuals, and North Carolina the visual artists--and modernist works of art that could be had for not a lot of money. I loved that museum. More recently, the museum has expanded and diversified what it displays, and dedicated a lot of space to putting works into juxtaposition. The curation is always careful, considered, and really does draw out a lot that you might not notice if a work was simply one in a row with a bunch of other things that were kind of the same.

And then there's the Michael Richards:

When I first came to the museum in 2004, it was the first thing I saw. The promise of postmodernism, a work that juxtaposed two different things I had independent knowledge about, and made something more of the juxtaposition: I could recognize it immediately as a St. Sebastian figure and a Tuskeegee Airman. I had met some of the Tuskeegee Airmen when I was a kid--they were warm and kind and honest about what they had experienced--and knew the St. Sebastian story, and I could see in a flash why those two worked together, how each heightened and deepened the other, and the work required no didacticism to say what it meant, it just was it. 

I was young when I saw it first, and I assumed with the confidence of youth that all art was going to be like that, but in truth very little art is like that. But it's there for me to see, 30 minutes away, to remember and be reminded.